Shattered (11 page)

Shit.

He didn't want to embarrass the kid, but there was no way he could let this pass. He barely knew his nephew, just like he barely knew his brother anymore. Just as he himself had, Ryan had done his own thing since escaping from this hellhole, and if they spoke once every three or four months they were doing something. But here he was, a presumably responsible adult, faced with a roomful of kids breaking the law in so many ways he didn't know where to start. That one of them was his own nephew was simply the icing on the cake.

So handle it.

"Go pour the beer down the sink in the kitchen," he said in a level tone as Chase, chugging from the can again, high-fived one of his relieved-looking friends. Another of the boys--older-looking, taller than Chase but still spindly in the way of teenage boys, with spiky black hair and a single earring--was already leaning down to retrieve his beer from the floor. Straightening with it in his hand, he met Scott's gaze. There was defiance in his eyes, but Scott thought that beneath it he detected a trace of uncertainty, too.

"All of you," Scott added firmly. "Go pour it out."

"Man, that 's a waste of good brew," the kid protested.

"Do it."

Chase shot him a challenging look. "Just because you're my uncle don't give you the right to tell me or my friends what to do."

"Then how 'bout just because I'm the Fayette County prosecutor with the power to throw all of you into juvie hall?" The smile he gave Chase was grim. Pulling his cell phone from his pocket, he held it up for them to see. "I'm giving you all to the count of ten to go pour out the beer and get back in here or I call the cops. Oh, and you can put any pot or anything else illegal you have on you down there on that coffee table when you get back. You don't take this chance to come clean and I find it on you later, you're in big trouble. And anybody getting the bright idea of running for it, forget it. I took down your license-plate number before I came in."

The lie came easily to his lips.

"Is he for real?" the kid holding the beer asked Chase.

Chase shrugged, looking sullen. "Maybe."

"Yeah, I'm for real. Believe it.
One.
" Scott started to count, while his nephew cast him a look of loathing. "Two."

"Come on," Chase said in a sulky tone to his friends. Gathering up beers, shooting him angry looks, they trooped to the kitchen. Scott moved so that he could keep them in view. When they trudged back into the living room, Scott was on
seven.

"Pot." He indicated the rickety faux-maple table that had occupied pride of place in front of the ancient green tweed couch for as long as he could remember. In a nice counterbalance to the differing shades of green offered by the couch and the curtains, the walls were a faded mustard and the only chair was a brown vinyl recliner. His dad 's pride and joy, an aging, console-type big-screen TV, stood in front of the closed curtains. A cheap landscape hung over the couch, and a rectangle of carpet remnant in a never-show-dirt shade of brown covered most of the floor.

"Satisfied?" Chase glared at him as his friends dropped a few joints on the coffee table.

"
Nine.
I'm telling you, this is your last chance." Scott glanced sternly around the group. One girl was plump, with long, dyed blond hair and too much eyeliner. The other was thin, with short, black hair and a ring through her nose. Both were about five-foot-five and wore tight tees--pink for the blonde, green for the brunette--over tiny little shorts. One of the boys had glasses and a blond buzz cut. Another had a sweep of brown hair carefully styled to cover one eye. All wore saggy jeans and tees. The kid with the sweeping hair grimaced and dug into a pocket of his jeans. He came up with a baggie, which he dropped on the table. In the baggie was a whole lot of what looked like crumbled grass. Pot, enough for maybe a dozen or more joints. Enough so that the idiot kid was looking at possession with intent to sell.

"What 's your name?" he asked the kid.

"Austin."

"Austin what?"

"Spicer."

"How old are you?"

"Sixteen."

"You dealing?" The amount of pot prompted the question.

"No! It's just for us."

The indignation on his face convinced Scott he was telling the truth. Which made the situation better but not a whole hell of a lot better.

Shit again
.
This I do not need.

"Please don't call the police." The plump blonde was visibly shaking. Her eyes, which were ringed by enough black eyeliner to do a raccoon proud, beseeched him. "I've got a three-point-eight grade point average. My mom says if I keep it up I can get a scholarship to maybe an Ivy League college. But if I get arrested, I probably won't even be able to get into college.
Any
college. My mom'll die."

"Juvenile records are sealed," the guy with the spiky black hair said scornfully. "You get arrested when you're under eighteen, nobody ever knows."

"You been arrested?" Scott asked him. If this kid had priors, it would make a difference.

"No."

"Then where you getting your information?"

"I heard it around."

"Any of you been arrested before?"

He was answered by a chorus of scared noes.

"Who drove?"

The kid with the spiky black hair held up a hand. Scott's lips thinned.

"Besides the whole being underage thing, you ever hear of the law against drinking and driving?"

"I wasn't drinking and driving! I just opened up this one beer after I got here. I didn't even get a chance to take a sip."

Scott had already concluded that he 'd interrupted the group almost immediately after they'd arrived. Nobody'd had time to get so much as a buzz going.

"Who else drove?"

Silence greeted that. Between the guilty expressions and the scared ones, and adding in his brother's truck, Scott was pretty sure he knew the answer even before Chase gave him a truculent look and said, "Me."

Scott held his nephew's gaze. The blue eyes that ran in the family stared back at him defiantly.

"Any of you working? In summer school?"

"Nobody's hiring. Not even Walmart," Austin said. "Sometimes Matt and I cut grass."

"I babysit sometimes," the black-haired girl said.

"That it?" Scott looked around. Nobody said anything.

"What are you going to do?" The blonde's voice shook.

Scott made up his mind. Hell, he'd known enough wild kids in his life to fill up a stadium. The majority of them had even turned out okay. Luckily, stupid was something most people grew out of.

"First, I want everybody's name, address, and phone number. And I want to see some ID."

Two driver's licenses were produced. The others were too young to possess them. Improvising, he used his cell phone 's camera to record them giving the information he 'd asked for. The object, besides the obvious, was to scare them into realizing how much trouble they were in.

"Ashley Brookings. I'm fifteen." That was the blonde girl. She brushed away a tear, and he saw that she had black nail polish to match the mess around her eyes. She gave her address and phone number, adding, "Oh, please don't call my mom."

"Matt Lutz. Sixteen," the kid with the spiky black hair said as Scott next pointed his phone at him. He, too, gave his address and phone number. "Hey, Ashley, the worst your mom'll do is ground you. Big deal. If my coach finds out, I'll get kicked off the basketball team."

"My mom will
cry.
" Ashley's lips trembled. Jesus, he was starting to feel like an asshole. Next thing on his list should be kicking puppies. But what else could he do? "She'll think she's done a bad job raising me. Because she 's a s-single mother."

"You only ever sit on the bench, Matt. It's not like you getting kicked off the team would be some big loss," Austin said.

"At least I made the team," Matt retorted, and the two glared at each other.

"That's enough," Scott intervened, and pointed his phone at the black-haired girl. "You. Go."

"Sarah Gibbons. I'm fifteen." The black-haired girl looked at him instead of at the camera as she provided the rest of the required information. "I live with my grandparents. Me and my brother. If they find out about this, they're going to be so pissed at me."

"They're always pissed at you," Austin said. "It's 'cause they didn't want to get stuck with you in the first place."

"That's not true, Sarah." Ashley turned reproachful eyes on Austin, who shrugged.

Scott gritted his teeth and aimed his phone at the next kid. If he had it to do over again, he would have just kept on driving when he'd seen the lights on in the house and the vehicles in the driveway. But having stopped, now he was stuck. The kids had broken the law and deserved punishment, but he couldn't bring himself to call the cops. Getting these kids involved in the juvenile system wasn't the answer, at least not at this point. Probably calling the parents, grandparents, whoever, was the right thing to do, but he already knew he wasn't going to do that, either. The thought of the kind of punishment his own father would have meted out to him under such circumstances stopped him cold. His old man would have beaten the hell out of him, not because he 'd been caught with illegal substances but because he would have been infuriated at receiving the phone call.

Right or wrong, he wasn't taking the chance of bringing something like that down on the heads of one of these kids. Call it a phobia of his.

"Noah Chapman. Fifteen." The kid with the blond buzz cut and glasses looked scared as he recited his contact information.

"I already told you my name and how old I am." Austin folded his arms over his chest when Scott pointed the cell phone at him. He provided his address and phone number with a shrug. "Go ahead and call my parents. They won't give a shit."

In Scott's opinion, the kid 's bravado said volumes about his life, and none of it was good.

"Shut up, Austin," the girls and Matt snapped at the same time.

"You understand I got to take some action here." Scott tucked the phone away when he had them all on camera. "Smoking pot is against the law at any age. Drinking alcohol when you're under twenty-one is also against the law. Besides that, doing either is stupid. It messes up your brain. It screws up your life."

"Look, we're sorry, and we won't do it again, okay?" Chase glared at him, his expression the opposite of penitent. "So, how about you give us a break?"

"Yeah." The rest of the group nodded and threw in variations on the theme of
We've learned our lesson; we won't do it again.
All of it sounded about as believable as Chase's apology.

"Please," Ashley added in a small voice.

Scott looked at them meditatively.

"I am giving you a break. I haven't called the cops. And I'm not calling your parents, grandparents, guardians, whatever. Unless you make me." He paused, watching wryly as they, some more discreetly than others, slumped with relief. "But there are going to be consequences. First of all, we 're all going to get together again tomorrow. In my office. Chase will tell you where that is. When's a good time?" He did a quick mental review of his schedule. It was hectic and unpredictable. There wasn't an ounce of free time in it anywhere to begin with, then add in the fact that he was going to have to deal with the ongoing problem that was his dad and it became impossible. But still he was going to fit them in. Hell, if he couldn't be there, he'd deputize someone else.

"Before noon," he added.

After that he had to be in court.

"Why?" Chase regarded him suspiciously.

"Because I think it's time you gave back to the community," Scott said. "We 're going to find you something productive to do. Think of it as your own private pretrial diversionary program."

"You can't make us do anything," Matt said. "Only a judge can do that, and you've got to go to court first."

"I guess we can do it that way, if you want." Scott's tone was falsely amiable.

"Matt."
Ashley glared at him.

He visibly wilted. "Just sayin'."

"I don't think I can . . ." Sarah began.

"You got here, you can get there." Scott gave them a grim smile. "Or we can deal with this some other way. Your call."

"Ten o'clock. We can make it." Ashley's tone verged on the desperate. "Can't we, guys?"

"But my grandma might not . . ." Sarah objected in an urgent undertone.

"You're supposed to be spending the night at my house. I mean, you
are
spending the night at my house. We can go by his office before you go home," Ashley hissed.

"Oh, okay."

"What about the rest of you?" Scott looked at the boys, who nodded morosely.

"Ten a.m. tomorrow in my office it is, then. You're not there, I call your folks. Got it?"

"Yes," Ashley agreed, to the accompaniment of another round of less than enthusiastic nods.

"Good. Now get the hell out of here. Go home. All except you." He pointed at Chase. "You I want to talk to."

8

"No way,"
Chase protested as his friends, giving one another sidelong glances, headed in a relieved shuffle toward the door. He looked after them in alarm. "Hey, don't leave me."

Ashley sent him an apologetic look, and Noah muttered, "Sorry, man," but still they went. Chase would have followed, but Scott blocked his path.

"You can't make me stay here."

"Sure I can."

"Oh, what are you going to do, beat me up? Like I'm scared of you."

"You give me any more trouble, and I'm going to call your dad. And that 's just for starters."

Chase sneered. "Good luck with that. Last time I saw him he was passed out on the kitchen floor."

"That how you were able to steal his truck?"

Chase glared at him. "I didn't steal it."

"No way in hell he gave you permission to take it. You don't even have your license yet."

"I needed to get something to eat, okay? There wasn't any food in the house, and he was passed out drunk. I went to Dairy Queen. What was I supposed to do, starve?"